Bryan O'Neil Hughes

At last, we've reached the episode that fufills the prophecy begun when we chose to add two leading zeroes to the number of our first show, the now classic "Martini Hour 001, In Which Colleen Spills Her Drink." Normal podcasts would probably be celebrating the big 100th episode, but since this is our penultimate episode, we're feeling more sentimental than celebratory. Appropriately, our last guests, the Bette Midler and Robin Williams of Martini Hour, if you will, are our old friends Adobe's John Nack and Bryan O'Neil Hughes. (You'll have to decide which is Bette and which is Robin.) Having these guys in the lounge one more time provided an opportunity to reflect on their favorite moments and milestones in their experience of creating the mysterious, complicated, fabulous pixel manipulating juggernaut, Photoshop. 

Here is the obligatory partially complete bulleted list of the sentimental and insightful (as well as the ridiculous) things that made up our last guest infused episode: Read more » 

Welcome back to the 'lounge, dekeItarians. Hope you're feeling relaxed and happy. To help you with that, we've brought back some familiar voices this week, those of Adobe's Bryan O'Neil Hughes and John Nack. The last time we had the guys over, we discussed some of the flashy new features in Photoshop CS5 (like Puppet Warp and the infamous Content-Aware Phil). But deciding to upgrade isn't just about wanting the state-of-the-art features. Sometimes, it's those improvements to everyday tools that make your day-to-day work go more smoothly. Oh sure, it's fun to play digital Stretch Armstrong with pictures of your friends with the Puppet Warp. But it's also a downright relief to finally be able to simply drag-and-drop an image into a Photoshop composition. 

Here are some of those little polishes to the efficiency or usability of an often-used tool that make you wonder how you ever worked happily before this particular upgrade came along. Read more » 

At last our friends John (Nack, Adobe Senior Product Manager for Photoshop) and Bryan (O'Neil Hughes, Photoshop Product Manager) are in the lounge and free to speak about Photoshop CS5. We didn't even have to get them liquored up to extract secrets from them this time. No, we were freely able to quiz them about their favorite new features in the latest version of Photoshop. 

(For the record, I was there, and it was the real Bryan O'Neil Hughes, and he is not a witch. As far as we know...Although he does show an uncanny capability to run very long distances and still have a giant grin on his face. Suspicious, yes, but supernatural?)

Here's what we covered... Read more » 

In the words of Photoshop PM John Nack, "We swear because we care." If we weren't using Photoshop everyday, reveling in its amazing almost magical powers, we wouldn't notice all those little annoying things that make our work just a teeny bit irritating. Or a lot irritating if we have to repeat certain activities often. Regular loungers know that Deke and I even have a recurring segment of Martini Hour dedicated to our "pet peeves," in which we discuss those behaviors that just seem inexplicable or unneccesarily arduous to us. Well, it looks like we may have a little less fodder for that particular segment in the future.

In this week's show, we have a delightful time with our old (younger than us) friends from Adobe, John Nack and Bryan O'Neill Hughes, who share with us the "Just Do It" list of everyday requests from users that they're working on for potential future (code: next) versions of Photoshop. The idea here is that while they're making sure Photoshop keeps up with cutting edge software possibilities, they also take some time to go back and fix smallish if long-standing irritations and work on suggestions that come from experienced users of the product. 

Here are some of the JDI improvements you may see in the not-so-distant Photohsop future:  Read more »